Introduction to the Research Symposium Forum

Purpose

The purpose of this introduction is to provide an overview of the articles contained within this research forum of JSLHR. Each of these articles is based upon presentations from the 2017 ASHA Research Symposium.

This research forum contains papers from the 2017 Research Symposium at the ASHA Convention held in Los Angeles, California.

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) has been offering a research symposium at its annual convention since 1990. The purpose of this symposium, which is funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, is to discuss current research that has important implications for the study of communication processes and disorders. Each year's symposium focuses on a specific research theme. The theme of the 2017 Research Symposium was “Advances in Autism Research: From Learning Mechanisms to Novel Interventions.” I was fortunate to be asked to organize this program.

The six review articles in this forum cover a broad scope of topics, divided into four subject areas. I am excited that information from these excellent talks will now be more widely distributed as the articles published in this issue of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research (JSLHR).

The first article is titled “Changing Developmental Trajectories of Toddlers With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Strategies for Bridging Research to Community Practice.” Amy M. Wetherby, Juliann Woods, Whitney Guthrie, Abigail Delehanty, Jennifer A. Brown, Lindee Morgan, Renee D. Holland, Christopher Schatschneider, and Catherine Lord (2018) address the national priority of community-viable, evidence-based intervention for toddlers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). They review research to identify gaps in intervention research while incorporating findings that illustrate evidence from the Early Social Interaction model.

In the second article, “SMARTer Approach to Personalizing Intervention for Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder,” Connie Kasari, Alexandra Sturm, and Wendy Shih (2018) introduce research methods to help personalize intervention for children with ASD. They propose that by answering questions about the broad heterogeneity in children with ASD, we may better fill the gap between research and practice.

The next two articles cover the subject area of executive function and lexical development in children with ASD. First, Susan Ellis Weismer, Margarita Kaushanskaya, Caroline Larson, Janine Mathée, and Daniel Bolt (2018) review research focusing on executive function in children with ASD, addressing variables that contribute to inconsistencies, such as task issues, group comparisons, and participant heterogeneity. The authors evaluate the association between children's receptive and expressive language abilities. Next, Sudha Arunachalam and Rhiannon J. Luyster (2018) examine lexical development in children with ASD, describing key findings on children's acquisition of nouns, pronouns, and verbs. The authors invite readers to look beyond language input to consider what children with ASD might “intake” from that input.

The final two articles cover the subject area of early motor and communication development in ASD. In the first article, Jana M. Iverson (2018) focuses on infants who have an older sibling with ASD, examining whether or not early motor delays or atypicalities can predict eventual ASD diagnosis and if these delays have far-reaching, cascading effects on development. In this forum's final article, Ahmed Abdelaziz, Sara T. Kover, Manuela Wagner, and Letitia R. Naigles (2018) examine the shape bias—the tendency to extend a learned word–object relationship to items of similar shapes—in children with ASD. The authors studied potential sources of individual differences that these children demonstrated to better understand the absence or impairment of this bias in children with ASD.

I hope that these thought-provoking articles spark interest in both researchers and clinicians alike. Please enjoy the 2017 Research Symposium Forum.

Funding Statement

This article stems from the 2017 Research Symposium at ASHA Convention, which was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders of the National Institutes of Health under Award R13DC003383.